Daily life of a cultivation judge



Yang Qing still couldn't believe that Gui Shiren had a connection with the mysterious Dragon Meadow. 

The Dragon Meadow was an organization with unfathomable origins even to the Order and it wasn't only them but to the other Holy Lands too. 

The Dragon Meadow was an organization shrouded in mystery. It could be considered a bank or a treasure vault of some sort. For a fee, you could store whatever you wanted with them. 

However, what constituted a fee was always up to interpretation by them. It could range from something such as a copper coin, your produce from the farm, to sentimental things such as a wooden sword you trained with as a kid, or to extravagant things such as ascendant to saint grade treasures, or family heirlooms or your core cultivation art, well-guarded secret to some or a trade-in service. 

Whatever they decided would be the cost was always up to them and it was never up to debate or bargain. In exchange for payment, whatever you store with them has a 100% guarantee of safety within the terms of the contract.

You could be a qi refinement cultivator that has something stored with them, as long as it was within the Meadow's grounds, not even the Holy Lands could get their hands on it.

The Dragon Meadow could be considered to be one of the oldest organizations within the Southern Continent. Its existence seems to be even longer than the two Holy lands. For as long as one could remember the Dragon Meadow has always been there and it is still unknown exactly for how long.

Yang Qing even heard this crazy rumor that Dragon Meadow also existed in the Western and Eastern Continents, and was just as unfathomable and had a widespread reputation as it did on the Southern Continent.

Yang Qing shuddered to think about what it meant for an organization to have such a reputation across three different continents.  This was something even the Radiant sword sect and the Flowing Valley Sect couldn't do even as Holy Lands. At best, they could only exert their influence within the Southern Continent and not one party had complete dominance over the other. Even when the Myriad Beasts Sect was destroyed, it needed the two Holy Lands to work together along with a bulk of the top-ranking organizations within the Southern Continent.

While the Holy Lands may be respected if they visited other continents, it wasn't to the level where they could establish firm footholds in those continents, which if the rumor was true, was what the Dragon Meadow had done.

Because of that, no one knew whether to call them a Holy Land or something else. The two Holy Lands or any other Holy Land recorded from within the Southern Continent, none had ever tried to test their limits, however, there have been a few soul formation experts, domain experts, and a couple of dark organizations that did try to rob them. However, it's unknown where it is even located, and those that did manage to sneak their way to their headquarters with nefarious intentions were never heard from again.

Yang Qing once caught a few of his seniors throwing bets on how many soul formation experts have disappeared in the Meadow. The number he heard them throwing around left him shell-shocked. The most conservative estimate of the bunch had his guess at 5,000 soul formation experts.

That number was incomprehensible to Yang Qing since as far as he knew, he wasn't sure that the Order even had a third of that number lying around. 

Were the seniors' guesses based on truth? Or were they fooling around?

No matter the answer, what was undeniably true was if you wanted something safeguarded in the whole continent, there was no one better than the Dragon Meadow.

The Meadow despite presumably having unfathomable strength has never concerned itself with dominancy or exerting its influence or strength within the continent. Other than its storage services, it never concerned itself with anything else. Even when the Southern Continent was at the brink of destruction a couple of times, or when it pushed its wars to the point that foreign sects and organization almost snuck their fangs in, the Dragon Meadow never showed itself or made its stance clear. 

It was like it could care less what happened to the Southern Continent. As long as no one breached or infringed on its operations, they were indifferent to everyone and everything else. It was this attitude that made most cultivators trust their possessions with them. They were less likely to be betrayed by an organization that could care less if the world burned as long as its bottom line was maintained.

The Dragon Meadow had agents all around, but unless they revealed themselves to you, you would never know who they are or find a way of gaining the services of the Meadow. There seemed to be no criteria by which they chose their clientele. You could find saints, heretics, cripples, and geniuses within their list of clients. It seemed to follow no rhyme or reason. The fact that a syndicate member like Gui Shiren who had likely slaughtered a hundred thousand or two, was able to gain their services, showed character or even cultivation aptitude had nothing to do with it.

As for the real requirements…No one knew.

Yang Qing couldn't help but fantasize about being a storage holder of the Dragon Meadow. 

If it was a week ago, he wouldn't have entertained the thought. He had nothing but less than 10 middle-grade spirit stones to his name, but now, he could very well rival the wealth of a rank 4 clan with the number of gifts he had accumulated in the ceremony.

"Maybe I could splurge a little in the auction houses instead of trying my luck in the blind markets," thought Yang Qing before he dismissed those thoughts away. He still liked the idea of getting good finds for a steal price, and the mystery of it all, wondering whether you got a mundane object such as a rock or something special, like the tablet he gifted Dean Zhu Lao during his welcome party.

…

Gui Shiren was given the breakdown of his future by both Vice Warden Shao An and Assistant Director Feng Lei. Whatever information he had on him would have to wait for a couple of weeks to months, which was the estimated time Assistant Director Feng Lei had given on breaking the curses placed on him safely. 

The safety part of the equation sadly had nothing to do with Gui Shiren's well-being but rather the anonymity part. Insidious curses like the ones the Scarlet blood ghost hands syndicate used, had a lot of hidden mechanisms in them, one of which was alerts that were embedded in the curse. Those alerts would inform the one who placed them there, that their curse has been broken. Some even went as far as disclosing the identity of the person whose curse was broken.

If such a situation happened, then the syndicate would know Gui Shiren's death was a ruse, and whatever element of surprise they had would go with it or the syndicate could even capitalize on such information and set traps of their own. Such a scenario has happened on more than one occasion in the years that the Order has been targeting the Syndicate. Their curses were some of the most intricate the Order has ever come across, and the stronger the party was, the stronger and more refined the curse since they knew more and would present a great risk to the syndicate if they were caught. 

The reason the ninth blood finger had not divulged anything over the years despite being in the custody of the Order, other than his mental resilience, the major reason was the high-level curse placed on him. The level of skill involved in placing the curse showed how gifted the creator was along with the top grade of their technique. 

Luckily after intense study, the special inquisitors in assistance with the requiem guards, discovered that such a high-level curse had a restriction in terms of material and also the strength of the cultivator it was placed on. It required ascendant-grade materials along with a saint-grade material as the anchor, and the cultivator it was placed on needed to be in the domain realm at least, so they were not swallowed whole by the curse. With such a criterion, only the blood fingers could fulfill it. 

While Gui Shiren's curse was likely to be more sophisticated than Dong Yanlin's since the latter was weaker, the strength of the curse still had some degree of maneuverability to it. Assistant Director Feng Lei had some confidence in finding a workaround in a few months and from what Yang Qing heard, he had even enlisted Dean Zhu Lao's help as an assistant, which was why Vice Chancellor Wu Ling was present. He needed to sign off on it as his boss.